love, rage, and a three day dinner
plus, horses and lasagne in their most iconic collaboration since the 2013 Tesco horse meat scandal x
I was reminded this week, when I reread Nora Ephron’s incredible article ‘Moving On: a Love Story’, of this line: ‘love may or may not be homesickness, but homesickness is definitely love.’ I have been so busy lately (for months, to be honest), that sitting down with my parents for a meal is a rarity. I have probably had more smoothies than hot dinners this year. I hate this – coming home late, leaving early, ringfencing time to catch up with the people who raised me and who I still share a home with, if not a regular dialogue.
I am homesick for the home I live in. I am told I treat the house like a hotel by my mother, and in my less delicate moments I respond with rage, telling her that I want nothing more than to move out. I am busy and exhausted and a pain to be around, and I know it. Inevitably, burn out hits, and I cancel all my plans. I arrive on the doorstep on Monday night and tell my mother I will be in for dinner. I’m sorry, I say. She’s probably prepared for a week of my absence, the sound of the chain going over the door a sign that I’m home safe, no time to respond when I call out a hurried ‘goodbye’ in the morning and slam the door.
Her response is to spend three days making me a lasagne. More specifically, Nigella’s lasagne of love. My mum is a vegetarian, and my dad has just discovered the Mediterranean diet about twenty years too late. I will be the sole beneficiary of this lasagne, which is supposed to serve nine to twelve people. She begins on Tuesday, with the meat sauce, while I am at work. When I arrive home, she tells me the lasagne isn’t ready yet, that I can have it tomorrow. I heat frozen sausage casserole in the microwave, quietly happy that the gratification has been delayed.
On Wednesday, two horses are photographed running through London – one black and one white and covered in blood. I look at that white horse, running madly, eyes wide, free and terrified, bright red staining its coat, and immediately think, “yeah, same actually”. As the horses rampage through Aldwych all the way to Limehouse, I am watching my Twitter feed like a woman possessed. Is this a John Mulaney sketch? The end of days (Big Ben ominously stopped at 9 am, which didn’t help)? Literally just a couple of photogenic stallions who got a bit frightened on a mental health stomp? All the beauty and the horror – it’s a bit much.
I arrive home from university before the sun has even considered setting, a rarity for me. The whole evening stretches out before me – my lasagne, an episode of something silly, a bath. I find Mum in the kitchen, stirring carrots and onion skins into some milk on the hob. “It’s for the bechamel sauce,” she explains. “Nigella says it will be a primrose colour.” Okay. We talk about the horse, how we are worried about its injury. We wonder if anyone has checked on the ravens in the Tower of London. We ask about each other’s days. I retreat upstairs, feeling a sense of calm I haven’t in days, maybe even weeks.
Half an hour later, a WhatsApp message: ‘1 litre of milk takes unbelievably long time to reach boiling point’. Then: ‘Cooking times so leaving out all prep: 20 mins + 15mins + unspecified time bringing to boil + 1 hour + minimum of 30mins + 40-60 mins + 30 mins + recommending leaving to stand for 20-30 mins before eating …. So 4 hours, give or take (I’m not including stuff that is done while something else cooking).’ We agree over fishfingers that Nigella is exhibiting jobless behaviour.
By Thursday I feel on edge again, convinced that I’m bad company, that nothing is going to work out for me. The white horse smashed into a Mercedes Benz in its panic and took shards of glass to its chest, apparently, and is in critical condition. I’ve seen so many tweets about how this is what it’s like to be a woman. To have desires. To exist in a hostile world that still demands vulnerability. It is very symptomatic of our cultural moment, I think, that I see these and immediately agree. I feel all of it: the tenderness and the rage. This horse is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a metaphor.
I am in a season of what I am optimistically terming ‘uncertainty’. Sometimes, it feels more like the moment right before a rollercoaster starts moving - your stomach is in knots and the bars have come down but everything is still and you’d sort of like to get off but it’s too late now and also you’re really brave so it’ll be fine but you sort feel like crying and begging for someone to stop it before it starts. More plainly – I’m staring down the barrel of an unemployment era of undefined length, getting ready to fly the nest if a job materialises, and in a transitionary phase in most of my relationships. Everything is up in the air. At the risk of flogging a rampaging horse, I am actually that horse, spooked and aimless. I have also never felt such a strong desire for peace, for tenderness. It’s a balance I’m trying and failing to strike – often angry, always wanting.
It's all around me, too: a man lightly strokes his partner’s knee on the Thameslink as she reads to let her know it is their stop. A day later, a train guard with an aggressive voice tells a young man asking for money for a hostel that he doesn’t care, that he’s ‘got to make a living too’, that he needs to stop. Both times, my eyes could burn holes. I am indignant and full of awe, the pit of my stomach holding the bitterness and the softness together.
A baby is pulled alive from her martyred mother’s stomach in Gaza. The doctor in the Guardian video, which I stumble across sandwiched between a meme and a video about situationships in my recommended posts tab on Instagram, says: ‘even if this child survives, they were born an orphan’. I can’t find out whether this baby is still alive. I want to find out. How do I find out? The man’s eyes are so tired, but he calls the baby beautiful, tells us she is stable. I can’t get it out of my head.
When I get home on Thursday, tired and bedraggled, my mother tells me my lasagne is in the oven. “I’m really sorry, it’s still got forty minutes,” she sighs. I run myself a bath, make my legs smooth, first with a razor and then with cocoa butter. I come back downstairs and it is ready. And it is crispy and cheesy and perfect and worth every single one of the hours spent on it. I am reminded of how, between arguments and pettiness and the thrill of having the last word, selfless love can exist too. The kind of love that causes my mother to make me a meal she will never sample, to portion the leftovers in boxes in the freezer so that next time I arrive home after dark, ravenous, wide eyed, I will not go hungry.
Portents of the end of the world abound. It’s bleak to exist with so much love and so much anger, to watch the righteous love and anger of others met with violence. But it is so beautiful when good things happen, and I am addicted to the relief. When the horses are safe, when protestors are encircled by staff in solidarity, when crowds flock to replace those arrested. When my mother labours in the kitchen for days and I get to taste love on my tongue for the first time in weeks. We have no choice but to trust that all of this will be beautiful one day, no matter how long it takes.
This was so immensely beautiful. I feel so so so strongly so much of this. xx
Beautiful